What is a Woman (Boxer)?

It’s really not that hard… or is it?

I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to write much. And, frankly, I’ve been avoiding hot-button issues. However, the controversy over the recent women’s division Olympic boxing match between Imane Khelif and Angela Carini jarred me out of my bubble. As you know, Carini (who is genetically XX) was so outmatched by Khelif (who is genetically XY) that she forfeited the bout in less than a minute. This unfortunate event turned up the volume on the ‘What-is-a-woman?’ controversy, this time centering around DSD’s (differences in sexual development). The IOC president even challenged his critics “to come up with a scientific-based new definition of who is a woman.”

In my naïveté, I thought we were getting closer to a resolution on this topic. But apparently not. I guess trying to define that enigmatic being called ‘woman’ still eludes a lot of otherwise smart people. I should’ve realized how difficult the problem is, given that it flummoxed a Harvard-educated Supreme Court nominee, the International Olympic Committee, and any number of university professors.

The question of whether Khelif should be competing in the women’s division led to an explosion of articles trying to explain the genetic and phenotypic (biological) differences between the two fighters. Some of the explanations were quite good, others less so. But all, by necessity, had to gloss over some of the biological nuances in order to make their arguments clear to their audiences. Sometimes that makes an issue seem simpler than it is.

After thinking about the controversy for a while, and given that so many smart people seem unable to define ‘woman’, I began to wonder whether I was missing something. Maybe I didn’t understand the issue. As I’ve written before, I have no problem admitting how stupid I am. So, I did a little bit of soul-searching. Was I smart enough to come up with a definition of ‘woman’ that would satisfy me, even if no one else?

At first, I thought I could just claim that women have two X chromosomes and men have just one. If I excluded those rare aneuploid conditions (when people have an abnormal number of chromosomes), I thought this definition was pretty good. I even thought that most people would agree with me. But then I remembered that in species with XY sex-determination systems (like humans), one of the X chromosomes in every female cell is inactivated during embryonic development by a process called lionization. That means that women really have only one functioning X chromosome in each cell, just like men do.

The inactivated X chromosome forms what’s called a Barr body, and there is always one fewer than the total number of X chromosomes in a cell. For instance, males with Klinefelter syndrome (47, XXY) have one Barr body, while females with a 47, XXX karyotype have two. I guess everybody has just one functioning X chromosome. So, that one-versus-two-X-chromosome definition of ‘woman’ doesn’t seem to work.

Then, I thought maybe I could use the big-gamete/small-gamete dichotomy. That’s the definition claiming that females are distinguished by the size of their gametes (eggs): female animals make big eggs, and males make comparatively smaller sperm. At first, that seemed like a pretty good definition, too, despite the fact that there are always exceptions in biology. For instance, the fruit fly, Drosophila bifurca produces a sperm 20 times longer than its entire body and 300 times longer than a female’s egg is wide. Weird flies aside, however, I thought the definition might still work for humans.

So, to be sure that I knew exactly what I was talking about, I Googled the term “gamete.” I got this definition: “…a haploid cell that fuses with another haploid cell during fertilization in organisms that reproduce sexually.”

Okay, simple enough: I could define ‘women’ as the members of our species that produce large, haploid reproductive cells. But then I thought again… Do women really produce haploid reproductive cells? Apparently, everybody thinks so, but is it true? If they don’t, then this definition won’t work either.

So, I grabbed my calculator and tried to figure out the biology. Human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes. That’s 46 in total. A haploid cell — a gamete, according to the Google definition — would have just 23 chromosomes.

Oogenesis, the process by which females produce eggs, begins during early fetal development. Primordial germ cells, which have 46 chromosomes, migrate to the developing ovaries, differentiate into oogonia (the initial cells in oogenesis), and proliferate. After 20 weeks of development, the fetus has about 6 million of these cells. Most will die, but the several hundred thousand that remain each have 46 chromosomes.

As they proliferate, the oogonia enter into meiosis I, the first of a two-stage process of cell division that begins with a complete duplication of their DNA. However, meiosis I doesn’t proceed to completion. Just after it begins, it arrests in an initial phase called prophase I. All of the oogonia will remain in this state of suspended animation until puberty. At this developmental stage, the cells are called primary oocytes. And, because all of their DNA was duplicated, each has 92 chromosomes (four times the haploid number of 23).

Then, about every four weeks after the onset of puberty, one of these primary oocytes will mature and complete meiosis I, dividing into a large secondary oocyte and a tiny cell called a polar body. The polar body will disintegrate. The secondary oocyte — now containing 46 chromosomes — will be expelled from the ovary into the abdominal cavity (as it is in all vertebrates), and be swept into the fallopian tube by finger-like projections called fimbriae.

Now here’s the interesting part. You have to think this through with me: Once that secondary oocyte is in the fallopian tube, it’s actually outside of the woman’s body. This is a hard concept to understand at first (my students always have difficulty with it). You have to think of this as analogous to having a marble in your mouth. The marble isn’t actually within your body walls. It’s just sitting in an indentation, or pouch. If you open your mouth, the marble falls out. It’s the same with the secondary oocyte. If it never gets fertilized, it’s going to fall out during menstruation. At this point, the woman (however we’re going to define her) doesn’t have any direct control over the oocyte. It’s on an independent journey. And, with its 46 chromosomes, it doesn’t meet Google’s definition of a gamete, does it?

But let’s be open-minded and give this independent cell the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it will become a gamete eventually if it meets a sperm (which is, by the way, a haploid gamete). If a sperm happens to fuse with the oocyte, it will be drawn inside and its nuclear membrane will dissolve, releasing its 23 chromosomes into the oocyte’s interior. At this point, the new cell — which is a fusion of oocyte and sperm, and belongs neither to the female nor male — is called a zygote. It contains 69 chromosomes (46 from the oocyte and 23 from the sperm). The fusion event causes the zygote to go through meiosis II, a division process that ejects the 23 superfluous chromosomes contributed by the oocyte.

So, the best that I can figure is that females never actually produce a haploid cell that meets the definition of a ‘gamete’. Only males do. Consequently, the large-gamete/small-gamete distinction between women and men doesn’t make any sense, either.

By the time I thought through all of this, I was really confused. But I gave it one more try. Maybe I could define ‘woman’ by saying they’re adult humans without a Y chromosome. Then I came across this paper in Best Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology: “The XY Female.”

I give up. I guess I’m not smart enough to come up with a good definition of ‘woman’ either. Maybe there isn’t any good definition… Maybe there isn’t such a thing. Maybe anybody should be able to box anybody.

Oh, I have to stop writing now. I was just reminded that we have a dinner reservation. It’s our date night.

I have a sneaking suspicion that about half an hour after dinner, questions like “What is a woman?” and “What is a man?” won’t seem so ambiguous.

Epilogue

Did you see what I did there?

If you know enough biology — or any other subject, for that matter — it’s easy to obfuscate any issue. The reason is that there’s always been, and always will be ambiguities in biological terminology. Attempts to create ironclad definitions without any exceptions or nuanced qualifications are a fool’s errand. Of course, that doesn’t mean that definitions are meaningless, arbitrary, or useless. However, it does mean that all definitions have what are called fuzzy boundaries.

Battles fought across those boundaries with escalating volleys of increasingly obscure biological facts are unwinnable. I learned this when I read Dr. Seuss’  The Butter Battle Book to my children. (I expected my 4 to 8-year-olds to understand it. Shouldn’t grown-ups?)

Ideologues who continue to battle across definitional boundaries with what they perceive to be invincible arsenals of biological information simply give credence to the aphorism:

One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong. — Neil deGrasse Tyson

The argument over who should fight whom in a boxing ring cannot be settled by arguing about the biological definition of ‘woman.’ The answer does not lie in the nuances of biology. (I’ve made this point about the abortion debate, too.) Of course, biology should inform the discussion. However, the fundamental question has to do with what kind of person you want to be, and in what kind of world you want to live. These are questions of compassion, integrity, ethics, and societal norms, not biology.

Quite frankly, as a relatively large, former competitive weightlifter, I could easily butt into the front of a frustratingly long checkout line at the grocery store (as I’ve seen other people do). However, I would never do so. That’s the same ethical standard that prevents me from competing against a person who has a clear physiological disadvantage compared to me. The issue has nothing to do with how I identify, what my subjective self-perception is, or what my personal needs are (like, am I in a hurry to get out of the store).

At a societal level, we can ask ourselves this: Do we want to live in a world where women athletes get pummeled, displaced or replaced, or where seasoned, adult athletes compete against youngsters? Again, this has nothing to do with the subjective self-perceptions of the athletes. It’s an ethical question that has to do with fairness. And, it does not preclude inclusion. (I made that point in the essay, “Steroids, ‘Gender,’ and Fair Play.”)

We can bicker forever about the definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, or we can establish some common-sense guidelines about the behaviors that we expect from each other. Again, maybe I'm naïve; maybe I'm stupid. However, I believe that I’m smart enough to know that creating divisions within sports that identify athletes based on fundamental biological and experiential criteria — like weight, age, novice-open-senior status, genetics, (dis)ability, etc. — can be done without arguing about the philosophical definitions of the classes themselves. For instance, assigning a weightlifter to the Masters-III division (60-69 years old) does not require an analysis of the term ‘senior citizen,’ or ‘elderly.’ A weightlifter assigned to the 220-pound class (like me) doesn’t require a discussion about whether or not I am ‘obese.’ And, finally, classifying an athlete into a female (XX), open-female (XX, XY), or male (XY) competitive category does not require defining the term ‘woman.’ These are simply competitive categories, not metaphysical statements about the nature of the universe.

I think we’d agree that everyone should be valued and included, and that everyone who wants to compete should be able to compete. However, athletes must compete within fairly defined categories, and awards should be given within those categories. Otherwise, athletics becomes a farce. It's really not that hard.